Follow the life of a retired teacher working her way through the bucket list. How much can be achieved in the next 10 years - from the mundane (baking an edible cake) to the ridiculous (kayaking through the rain forest).

Bucket List

Welcome to my blog

This is it! I've given up work -retired from the rat race and am about to start on a 10 year adventure, doing all those things I've been meaning to do but never had the time to do them. I've offloaded my responsibilities and it is now my time. So follow my adventures and see whether I actually manage anything!

Monday, 26 September 2016

Traffic marshals

A new occupation on the streets of London is that of a traffic marshal. I'd never heard of them until this year and now they seem to be everywhere. There is a tremendous amount of reconstruction going on in London, in particular with the new cross rail going from one side of London to the other. As a consequence pedestrians need to be managed as well as traffic hence the need for these marshals.

These photos were taken near London Bridge rail station. It is the first time I have seen one of these concertina type barriers being used to close the road to traffic

They work very well as they are quickly manoeuvered into position and the road is only closed for a minute or so to allow a lorry to reverse out of the construction site.

I remember seeing the traffic marshals at construction sites in Bangkok in the late 80s and we have had them here for a long time perhaps precipitated by the death of an old lady hit by a reversing truck on a Sydney building site.

For now, we still have marshals stepping out on to the road with stop signs. I expect we will see the concertina barriers soon enough. A smaller version are used by tram customer service people to control pedestrians at very busy events where tram stops become overcrowded.

As an aside, when the plastic water filled barriers first arrived in Australia, they were called New Jersey Barriers. That name did not last long and I think they are just called water filled barriers now.

I think we use the name traffic controllers and not marshals.

PS Marshal with one 'l' looked incorrect to me and researching has led me to understand one l is correct in the noun.

Whenever there are road works where I live, there will be a traffic marshall around to turn away any cars and let the buses go through (in most cases anyway). And on some roads there will be eight buses every hour, which means the road works have to stop that often as well...

Those barriers would be very handy and easy to use, to say nothing of their great visibility! It's good the traffic marshals are all dressed in orange. Here those directing traffic only wear a neon green vest with dark uniforms underneath. Not nearly as visible as your orange guys.